Читать книгу Zen Masters of Japan - Richard Bryan McDaniel - Страница 16

Dogen Kigen was born in the year 1200. His ancestry was noble. His mother, Lady Motofusa, was a descendant of the powerful Fujiwara clan and was the concubine of Lord Minamoto Michichika, who served in the imperial household. Their son spent his earliest years in the rarefied atmosphere of the court. He was recognized as a precocious child who was able to read Chinese characters by the age of four. He had access to the best tutors available, and these provided the training considered suitable to one of his social standing.

Both of his parents died while Dogen was still a child. His father died when Dogen was two years old, and his mother became ill a few years later. She was a devout woman, and, during her final illness, she encouraged her son to spend his life wisely, to become a monk and seek a way to relieve the sufferings of humankind. Dogen was only eight years old when she died. As he sat beside her corpse during the official mourning period, he watched the smoke from a burning stick of incense rise into the air and dissipate. Observing it, he thought about his mother’s words and was struck by the impermanence of all things.

An uncle adopted Dogen and took charge of his education. It was the uncle’s intention that the boy would be his heir and serve in the imperial court. But at the age of thirteen, young Dogen ran away from the court to a member of his mother’s family who was a student of Buddhism and magic. With the aid of this relative, Dogen was received as a novice at Enryakuji, the Tendai Monastery on Mount Hiei. It was during his ordination ceremony that he was given the Buddhist name Dogen, which means “Foundation of the Way.” The young novice hoped that as a monk he would find answers to the questions he had been dwelling upon since his mother’s funeral.

The normal training for Tendai novices focused on the study of Buddhist sutras. Dogen was well versed in the Chinese language and took to the study easily. But although he found wisdom in those scriptures, he still felt they were abstract and far removed from the actual world in which people were born, lived, suffered, and died.

The sutras asserted that all sentient beings had Buddha-nature, but this was accepted as a tenet of faith and was not understood as something one had to aspire to realize for oneself. For Dogen, however, that teaching posed a problem. If all beings had Buddha-nature and thus—as the Buddha himself declared at the time of his enlightenment—all beings were inherently perfect, then why had it been necessary for the Buddha to strive to attain awakening, and why had the old Indian, Bodhidharma, spent nine years gazing at a wall at Shaolin Monastery in China? If one were already a Buddha, why did the masters of old have to make such efforts to become aware of their Buddha-nature?

This problem obsessed Dogen; his biographers have described it as a natural koan that preoccupied him day and night. He presented his concern to a former Tendai monk, Koin. Koin had also come to the decision that enlightenment could not be attained through academic study and had dedicated himself to the path of Pure Land Buddhism, spending his time in the devout repetition of the nembutsu. Koin was unable to answer the younger man’s questions, but he advised him to seek the counsel of Myoan Eisai, who had recently returned from China with teachings from the Zen school.

Dogen traveled to Kenninji and sought an audience with Eisai. He posed his question to the master, “If, as the scriptures assert, all of us already have the Buddha-nature, why is it that the masters of old had to struggle to attain awareness of it?”

Eisai told him, “No Buddha is conscious of having Buddha-nature, only the shallow are aware of it.”

Dogen sensed something profound in that answer, and he asked to be admitted to the monastery. Eisai accepted him as a student. Within a year, however, Eisai died, and Dogen continued studying under Eisai’s successor, Ryonen Myozen.

The Buddhism being taught in Kenninji was an amalgam of Tendai and Shingon with a little Chinese Zen mixed in. Dogen, who was drawn neither to the scholasticism of Tendai nor the ritualism of Shingon, hoped to have his doubts resolved through Zen teachings and practice. Although he had not yet come to Realization, his fervor was such that Myozen acknowledged him as one of his Dharma Heirs. When Myozen determined to follow the example of his master, Eisai, and travel to the Land of Song (as China was then called) in order to study with the Zen masters there, Dogen accompanied him.

They left for the Asian mainland in 1223. It was a rough crossing, and in his journal Dogen chronicled his seasickness and bouts of diarrhea. Once they landed at the port of Mingzhou, only Myozen was allowed to proceed. Dogen was confined to the ship and the dock for three months, perhaps because his papers were not in order or perhaps in medical quarantine. Although he was unable to move about, there was enough traffic at the docks that he learned a great deal about what was happening in the city and country. He was disappointed by what he learned of the apparent state of Buddhism in China. If Japanese Buddhism was still immature and caught up in ritualism and magical rites, the Buddhism of the Land of Song had grown stale and decrepit. Dogen worried that he might not find what he was looking for here.

Then in April, while still living on board the ship, Dogen met a cook (tenzo) from one of the Zen monasteries. The cook had come there hoping to purchase dried Japanese shiitake mushrooms from the ship’s galley. Dogen was struck by the tenzo’s deportment and wanted to quiz the monk about Zen practice. He invited the monk to remain on board that night as his guest. The tenzo declined, explaining that he was the head cook of his monastery and had to return to his duties.

“But would not spending your days in meditation be more profitable than cooking?” Dogen asked.

The tenzo gently suggested that the young Japanese visitor still did not know very much about Zen, and took his leave. Dogen was impressed by the tenzo’s manner and felt more confident that there might yet remain a few pockets of pure Buddhism in China.

Once Dogen was allowed to leave the docks, he followed Myozen to the monastery at Tientong. There he was received by Master Musai Ryoha (Wuji Liaopai) of the Soto School, who introduced him to the practice referred to as “silent illumination” or shikan taza.

Dogen remained at Tientong after Myozen died in 1225. He admired the strict discipline that the monks adhered to, but he was angered that according to their regulations he—as a foreigner—was considered subordinate to native-born novices much younger than he. It was a particularly galling situation for one who had been raised as an aristocrat. He protested that he was Myozen’s heir and that his rank should not be dependent upon his nationality. His protests were not well received and may have made his position at the monastery more difficult than it needed to have been.

When his situation failed to improve, Dogen left Tientong and embarked on a tour of other monasteries, still seeking the awakening or enlightenment experience that he only knew of from his reading. He also familiarized himself with the lineage charts of the various monasteries he visited and became well versed in the history of Chinese Zen. He would bring this respect for accurate records of transmission and succession back to Japan.

In the course of his travels, he had a second encounter with a tenzo. He found an elderly monk working in the heat of the day preparing food. The tenzo was hatless in the sun and walked barefoot over tiles which must have burned, but he showed no sign of discomfort. Dogen asked the monk how old he was, and the monk replied that he was approaching his seventieth year.

“Are there no younger monks who could assist you?” Dogen asked.

“Others are not me,” the tenzo answered. “These are my duties, how can someone else fulfill them?”

“But surely there’s no need to carry them out during the hottest period of the day,” Dogen persisted.

“If not now, when?” the monk asked.

“I can see that you are a man of the way (Dao),” Dogen said. “Please tell me, what is the true Way?”

“The universe has never concealed it,” the cook said and turned back to his work.

The conversation struck Dogen profoundly, and the memory of it would stay with him long after he returned to Japan.

Dogen came back to Tientong despite his displeasure over his status at the monastery. A new abbot had been installed, Tendo Nyojo (Tientong Rujing), and Dogen was greatly impressed by him. Here, he felt, was the “authentic” teacher for whom he had been searching. In later years, he would refer to Nyojo as the “Old Buddha.” Nyojo was a voluble critic of the koan study current in the Chinese Rinzai School that had replaced all other forms of meditation and practice. Dogen would come to share this point of view. Nyojo stressed that formless seated meditation—shikan taza—was the preeminent Buddhist activity. For three years, Dogen stayed with him, dedicating himself to zazen and shikan taza.

Nyojo’s sitting schedule was strenuous. Monks sat from early in the morning until late at night. When they showed signs of resistance, Nyojo upbraided them for the shallowness of their efforts, reminding them of the difficulties of the lives of those who lived outside the monastery, the long hours of labor demanded of farmers and other workers, the dangers associated with the life of a soldier.

The regular sitting schedule was even more onerous during the retreat periods known in Japanese as sesshin. During one such summer retreat, the monks were sitting late into the night, when Nyojo noticed that one had fallen asleep. He roused the monk, then admonished the group: “You must practice with all of your energy, even at the risk of your own lives. You must discard both body and mind!”

These words finally brought Dogen to a deep awakening. When it was time for the monks to attend dokusan, individual meetings with the teacher, Dogen strode into the room confidently and lit a stick of incense, an act reserved for rituals or significant celebrations.

“What is the point of this incense?” Nyogo demanded.

“I have discarded body and mind,” Dogen said.

“You have discarded body and mind. Body and mind have indeed been discarded.”

“Don’t confirm me so easily,” Dogen protested. “It may be no more than a temporary delusion.”

“I’m not confirming you so easily,” Nyojo said.

“Then show me you aren’t.”

“This is body and mind discarded,” Nyojo said, demonstrating what he meant.

Dogen bowed.

“And that is discarding discarded,” Nyojo remarked.

“The great matter of my life has been resolved,” Dogen declared.

“It is no small thing for a barbarian (a foreigner) to come to such a great awakening,” Nyojo told him.

Nyojo was so impressed with the depth of Dogen’s awakening that he acknowledged the younger man as his Dharma Heir. Dogen stayed at the monastery for a while longer, deepening his understanding, and providing a model for future Japanese Soto and Rinzai masters who would remain in training long after their initial awakening.

Nyojo invited him to remain at Tientong as his assistant. Dogen was honored by the offer but declined it.

In 1227, he decided it was time to return to Japan and did so—as he put it—“with empty hands.” Whereas previous visitors, like the monk Saicho, had returned from the Land of Song with copies of sutras and Buddhist artifacts, Dogen brought back only a portrait of Nyojo, the documents of succession which traced his teaching lineage back to Bodhidharma and beyond to the Buddha himself, and the ashes of Ryonen Myozen.

When asked what he had learned during his time in China, his self-deprecating reply was:

—that the eyes are horizontal and the nose is vertical; thus I am unable to be deceived by others. There is not even a hair of Buddhism in me. Now I pass the time naturally. The sun rises in the east every morning, and every night the moon sets in the west. When the clouds clear, the outline of the mountains appears, and as the rain passes away, the surrounding mountains bend down. What is it after all? (5)

When he returned to Kenninji in Kyoto in order to bury Myozen’s ashes, he was discouraged by what he found there. Living conditions, for example, were much more luxurious than the Spartan accommodations he had been familiar with in China. However, he did start to introduce others to the Zen teachings he had acquired, and it was here that he wrote a short work called Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendations for the Practice of Zazen).

The Fukanzazengi is a primer on Zen practice. Dogen felt he was introducing Japanese students to true zazen practice for the first time, so the instructions he provided were very exact. One must, he wrote, follow the examples of the Buddha and Bodhidharma who both committed themselves to prolonged meditation practice.

—you must suspend your attempts to understand by means of scrutinizing words, reverse the activity of the mind that seeks externally, and illuminate your own true nature. Mind and body will fall off spontaneously, and your original face will be revealed. . . .

For zazen, you will need a quiet room. Eat and drink in moderation. Forget about the concerns of the day and leave such matters alone. Do not judge things as good or evil, and cease such distinctions as “is” and “is not.” Halt the flow of the mind, and cease conceptualizing, thinking, and observing. Don’t sit in order to become a Buddha, because becoming a Buddha has nothing to do with such things as sitting or lying down. (6)

He describes in detail the instructions for placing a cushion on a mat and sitting upon it in either the traditional full lotus posture (with legs crossed and both feet resting on the thighs of the opposite legs) or half-lotus posture (with only one foot resting on the opposite thigh). He describes the proper alignment of the body, how to hold the hands in the lap (thumb tips touching), and stresses the importance of keeping the eyes open. Finally one is to regulate the breath (taking long deep breaths, following a natural rhythm), and, sitting “firmly and resolutely,” one thinks “about the unthinkable. How do you think about the unthinkable? Non-thinking. These are the essentials of zazen.” (7)

As Dogen began to attract students, he also attracted the enmity of other schools of Buddhism; the Tendai even attempted to have their rivals suppressed by government intervention. Dogen chose to avoid confrontation and left Kyoto for a small community south of the city. There he found an abandoned hermitage, Anyoin, where he was free to gather disciples. As their number increased, a larger temple—dedicated to Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion—was built to accommodate them. Soon Dogen was overseeing a growing monastic community. His chief disciple and head monk was Koun Ejo.

Later, at the invitation of a supporter, he relocated a third time to Fukui Prefecture north of Kyoto where he established Eiheiji. Although the original buildings have since been destroyed, Eiheiji remains, along with Sojiji, one of the two primary temples of the Soto Sect in Japan.

It was at Kannondori and Eiheiji that Dogen composed most of the essays that would later be brought together in his literary masterwork, the Shobogenzo. The title means “The True Eye of the Dharma”—the “eye of the Dharma” which, in the apocryphal tale, Gautama Buddha had passed on to the monk Kasyapa thus starting the Zen tradition.

The Sobogenzo is a collection of ninety-two essays on a wide variety of topics. It was written not in Chinese—the preferred ecclesiastical language of Buddhist writings in Japan—but in the vernacular. There are instructions on the proper form of meditation; there is a chapter of instructions to monastic cooks, doubtless inspired by the two tenzos Dogen had met in China; there are essays which express Dogen’s understanding of basic Buddhist teachings.

Throughout the collection, Dogen maintains that practice and enlightenment are one. The Buddha had taught that all beings, just as they are, are whole and perfect, that all beings had “Buddha-nature” even though they were not aware of it. In a similar vein, Dogen asserts that while seated in meditation, enlightenment is present, even if the individual is unaware of it. All one needs to do is to forget the “self” (one’s personality), and the larger Self (Buddha-nature) is present.

The essay entitled Genjokoan, provides an example of Dogen’s style and teaching.

Studying the Buddha Way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is causing the body-mind of oneself and the body-mind of others to be shed. There is ceasing the traces of enlightenment, which causes one to forever leave the traces of enlightenment which is cessation.

When people first seek the Teaching, they are far from the bounds of the Teaching. Once the Teaching is properly conveyed in oneself, already one is the original human being. . . .

People’s attaining enlightenment is like the moon reflected in water. The moon does not get wet, the water isn’t broken. Though it is a vast expansive light, it rests in a little bit of water—even the whole moon, the whole sky, rests in a dewdrop on the grass, rests in even a single droplet of water. . . .

—when one rides a boat out onto the ocean where there are no mountains and looks around, it only appears round, and one can see no other, different characteristics. However, this ocean is not round, nor is it square—the remaining qualities of the ocean are inexhaustible. . . .

As a fish travels through water, there is no bound to the water no matter how far it goes; as a bird flies through the sky, there’s no bound to the sky no matter how far it flies. While this is so, the fish and birds have never been apart from the water and the sky—it’s just that when the need is large the use is large, and when the requirement is small the use is small. In this way, though the bounds are unfailingly reached everywhere and tread upon in every single place, the bird would instantly die if it left the sky and the fish would instantly die if it left the water. Obviously, water is life; obviously, the sky is life. There is bird being life. There is fish being life. There is life being bird, there is life being fish. There must be progress beyond this—there is cultivation and realization, the existence of the living one being like this. . . . In this way, if someone cultivates and realizes the Buddha Way, it is attaining a principle, mastering the principle; it is encountering a practice, cultivating the practice. (8)

As he became older, Dogen became more critical of the Rinzai School and its use of koans, and yet several of the essays in the Shobogenzo are based on classic koans. Dogen’s criticism may have been based in part on his irritation over increased government support for the Rinzai School, or because Rinzai students could at times show more concern about passing koans than they were in understanding the teachings of Buddhism. On the other hand, he acknowledged his primary Dharma Heir, Koun Ejo, after Koun had resolved the koan “one thread [hair] passes through many holes.”

For Dogen, zazen was shikan taza, just sitting rather than reflecting on koans. He had discovered in China that there were monks who had developed the ability to answer koans without actually attaining real insight; Dogen did not want this empty practice to emerge in Japan as well.

Dogen’s health had never been robust, and while still in his early fifties he became seriously ill. He determined to go to Kyoto to seek medical treatment, and, suspecting he might not return, he first appointed Koun Ejo Abbot of Eiheiji in his place. Ejo then accompanied his master to Kyoto. On August 15, Dogen composed his death poem:

Although I hope to see it once more in the autumn

How can I sleep with such a moon this evening?

He died in Kyoto thirteen days later, at the age of 53.

Dogen, along with Hakuin Ekaku (born more than 400 years later), was one of the most significant figures in the history of Japanese Zen. The prominence of the Soto tradition both in Japan and North America is his legacy. But he was not always an easy man to deal with. He was subject to depression and could hold long resentments.

Whereas Eisai had sought to form alliances with influential figures in Kyoto and Kamakura, Dogen chose instead to stand aloof from such contacts. He preferred solitude and shunned the powerful. It was at least in part due to the prominence he acquired as a teacher that he left Kannon-dori and moved to the more isolated Eiheiji when the opportunity presented itself.

He was also a man who was aware of his own shortcomings. And when a group of students asked Dogen to tell them something about his life, he made this brief assessment: “Just one mistake after another.”